Wednesday, May 02, 2012

"Do It For Trayvon!" Another Black on White Beating

A Virginia newspaper waited two weeks before reporting a brutal beating suffered by two of their own employees, at the hands of a crowd of black youth out for a lark on a Saturday night. Why the delay in reporting on a violent assault that victimises two of your own people? Why indeed.

Two weeks have passed since reporters Dave Forster and Marjon Rostami - friends to me and many others at the newspaper - were attacked on a Saturday night as they drove home from a show at the Attucks Theatre. They had stopped at a red light, in a crowd of at least 100 young people walking on the sidewalk. Rostami locked her car door. Someone threw a rock at her window. Forster got out to confront the rock-thrower, and that's when the beating began.

...Forster and Rostami's story has not, until today, appeared in this paper. The responding officer coded the incident as a simple assault, despite their assertions that at least 30 people had participated in the attack. A reporter making routine checks of police reports would see "simple assault" and, if the names were unfamiliar, would be unlikely to write about it. In this case, editors hesitated to assign a story about their own employees. Would it seem like the paper treated its employees differently from other crime victims?

...The next day, Forster searched Twitter for mention of the attack.
One [tweet] chilled him.

"I feel for the white man who got beat up at the light," wrote one person.

...Forster and Rostami, both white, suffered a beating at the hands of a crowd of black teenagers.... Were Forster and Rostami beaten in some kind of warped, vigilante retribution for a killing 750 miles away, a person none of them knew? Was it just bombast? Is a beating funny, ever? _HamptonRoads.com

If this attack had involved a crowd of white youth attacking a middle-class black couple stopped at a red light on the way home, it would have become a headline in papers from coast to coast, and a leading story on broadcast media for weeks -- if not months (think of the Trayvon story).

Black on white violence has become so common -- and so embarrassing to leftist-oriented publishers and broadcast executives -- that it is almost universally ignored, despite its much greater prevalence.

And it seems that the publisher of the Virginia newspaper in question is very tight with the Obama administration -- another reason to try to keep the story quiet.